When you’re the only one investing in Detroit, you get featured in the Sunday Times.

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Scott over at WFNY jogged our memory on the Kyrie acquisition a couple days ago.  (See tweet at right.)  He’s right of course:  the Clippers included a non-protected first round pick in the Baron Davis for Mo Williams + Jamario Moon trade.  The Clippers’ pick, not the Cavs’, was the lottery winner that turned into Kyrie Irving.

And thank you Dan Gilbert as well.

But there’s more to this story.

The Clippers have a history of making bad choices, but these are not the Stepien-era Cavs.  The 2010 Clippers rolled out Eric Gordon, Chris Kaman, DeAndre Jordan, Baron Davis, and Blake Griffin.  They thought they were playoff contenders.  But they started slow (4-17), Kaman and Gordon got injured, the season was shot, and they decided to re-tool for 2011.  They became sellers at the trade deadline.*

If you’re in re-tool mode and you’re a young team with a #1 overall rookie all-star to build around… 31 year old guards don’t figure into the plan.  Baron Davis had a nice run with the Hornets and Warriors, averaging 20 PPG with a 42% FG% when he moved to LA.    But things went sideways fast.  Injuries and age caught up with Davis, his 3P% slipped below 30% and then there’s his contract.  Davis had $27M due him over the next two years.  The Clippers needed to dump that salary if they wanted to play in the free agent market.  And free agency is where the Clippers needed to be, not the draft.  They needed ‘the one piece.’  No rookie project will do.

Good luck finding a team owner willing to spend $27M on injury-prone, [slightly] chubby, very clubby, 30% shooting, 31 year old PG.  Even with the draft pick which is 72.5% likely to be #8 (2.8% chance at being #1), that’s a tough sell.

We don’t know, but we expect that the Clippers shopped the Davis + pick deal all over the NBA.  With three hours left before the deadline, the Cavs had the best deal on the table and the trade was made.  Looking harder at the numbers:

Davis is still owed nearly $28 million over the next two seasons and the balance of his $13 million contract this year. Moon’s contract expires after this season. Williams is owed the balance of his $9.3 million salary this season and, with player options of $8.5 million for each of the next two years, potentially could get out of his contract altogether. The savings should give the Clippers more flexibility in free agency the next two seasons.

[Math section]

Davis owed:  $28M + (13 * .25) = ~$31M
Williams:  8.5 + 8.5 + (9.3 * .25) = ~$19M
Moon:  3.0 * .25 = ~1M

The delta is roughly $11M.

[end Math]

Baron Davis was waived in December 2011… that’s nine months.

In other words:  Dan Gilbert spent $11,000,000 for the 2.8% chance to draft Kyrie Irving.

Ain’t that more than you can reasonably expect from a team owner? (more…)